Speilberg and the Coen Brothers haven’t come knocking quite yet but while on the trip I shot quite a bit of video and still photography that I wasn’t able to upload onto the website due to the impossibly slow connections. Now that I am back I’d like to use that choppy on-the-bike-video and remaining still photos to hopefully make a short film… with some help.

This is still very much in the embryonic stage so there isn’t too much to report right now. However, I have made contact with an excited film making maniac who will be sorting through the files to see if something can be pieced together.

Mat Tucciarone from New England Institute of Art will be working with my raw photos and video footage, along with some interviews he’ll be shooting, to put together a documentary about my trip. Both Mat (with one T) and myself are pumped about this project.

Check out Mat’s site: http://www.mathewtucciarone.com/

I read about Martin Strel about a year ago and was inspired by his story. He just finished a world record marathon swim down the length of the Amazon, 3,327 miles!

“The swim wasn’t just risky, it almost destroyed my mind. Although my body is ready, it will be years before I’m mentally prepared to face another challenge. In a way the Amazon was my Everest – I don’t have anywhere else to go. My focus is spreading the environmental message and campaigning for rivers. “And for now I’m happy to keep my feet on dry land.”

Martin, who has earned a living as a guitarist, supermarket worker and gambler, went on to conquer the Danube in Europe and America’s Mississippi before visiting South America – where he was shocked by the state of the Amazon. He started training hard in Slovenia with running, cross-country skiing, gymnastics and swimming – and bulked up with a diet of horse burgers and two bottles of wine a day.

This is just a quick recap of a totally insane and dedicated man. Be sure to check out the whole article and Martin’s website, AmazonSwim.

I found this video while searching Google Maps along the Transamazonica Highway. This was recorded outside the city of Santarem. Truly a sight to behold!

The man using nothing more than a spot light excites the fish into a frenzy and practically fills the bottom of the boat with live fish.

THE noise is not yet loud enough to disturb the sloths munching on the leaves of the cecropia trees, or the river terns that wing lazily over the Amazon’s mighty waters, or the secretive Indian tribes that live deep within the jungle. But along the tributaries of the world’s largest river the sound is plainly discernible, like a low rumble of thunder in the distance. It is the dull, grinding roar of bulldozers cutting naked red strips through the vast Amazon rain forest.

Read the whole article at Time.

Beltra’ won The Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP) Award at the Sony World Photography Awards. This contest, funded by the Prince of Wales, has awarded Beltra’, based out of Seattle, a fully funded assignment to photograph the rainforests of the world.

Mato Grosso State, March, 26, 2009 (Brasil): A cattle driver leads his herd down a road past cleared rainforest land 80km west of Alta Floresta near the MT 208 road. ©Daniel Beltra

“Traveling to the Amazon has been an incredible experience and I have been able to capture some powerful images that show the many different elements of the rainforest – the beauty, the wildlife, the local people and also the destruction“, says Daniel. “It is has been an eye-opening journey so far and I’m looking forward to photographing the Central African and South East Asian rainforests on the next parts of my trip. I hope the photos I produce will make a strongly persuasive argument for emergency action to preserve the world’s tropical rainforests”.

March 29th 2009, North West of Mato Grosso State (Brasil)..Enawene Nawe village. The indigenous tribe (500 members) is best known for their cultural richness. Their traditional fishing method of building barrages is being threatened by a project of 86 dams to be constructed on the Juruena river basin .

March 14th 2009, Manaus, Amazonas State (Brasil) Aerial view of the Anavilhanas archipelago on the Rio Negro near Manaus, Brazil.

March 20th 2009, Cristalino State Park, Alta Floresta, Mato Grosso (Brasil). View of the rainforest canopy from the ground in in Cristalino State Park, Brazil.

Check out more from Daniel Beltra’ here.

Visit Prince’s Rainforests Project here.

© Daniel Beltra, courtesy of The Prince’s Rainforests Project and Sony

Here’s the story of how it happened – and how we all need to pick up this fight. Earlier this year, Peru’s right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country’s swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon’s trees: “There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle.”

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia’s plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn’t bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block (12A)B, said in 2007: “My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests.” The company denies liability, saying they are “aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts”.

Read more here.

Read the rest of this article here.

Read the rest of this article here.